Specimens, Days

& now come spring, & absent of exigencies. The same calm breath, the light lingering to wane later & later, & the dawn daily more impatient to rise. & I still seem to myself a part of some ebbing current, almost other, almost witness to the passage of this own slow time. It’s not from distrusting happiness so much as participating in its inchoate shaping. Maybe it’s that the idea of contentment seems enervating, ultimately—some means of acquiescing to a feeling rather than finding its harmony in you. Contentment makes an assumption about time that I’d rather not make. It is enough, for now, to merely be. & in a day, maybe it’s the falling feather from the owl in the white spruce, or the opening brown-black gap of a puddle, the gentle wheeze of the pass, the scurrying tap of the magpies alighting on the corrugated roof. The eye makes its appeals in a language beyond our own, beyond the gymnastics of our thinking. Which seems the riddle. Odd to think that time ant

I am thinking about how cleanly divergent thought & feeling can be—two ghosts with no cognizance of one another, haunting the same tired house. & how powerlessness can sting me so, crop up from some long-dormant regret to stab & swiftly withdraw. how in thinking about the irrecuperable past it is our nature to rhapsodize over conditionals, over conjectures of what could have been, when in any case here we are, our palms upturned, our hearts in some heavy wake, or some spirited discovery, or lulled instead by the soft, plain music of the ordinary. that none of it effectively matters. & that it could not matter more. maybe, maybe those twinned ghosts can have names, & one of them can be the nihilist & the other the solipsist. & both can drag their spectral forms through the relief of shadow thirsting after some bright light that will never come, & both can feel the blue-black umbra of the moon, the color of a raven’s wing catching a silver arc of refracted